Disc Details

Contents

Work Title	Composer
I Sonetti Lussuriosi	Michael Nyman	Listen

Reviews

• The restlessly prolific Michael Nyman here pulls off a rather extraordinary feat. Inspired by the explicit sonnets that the Renaissance poet Pietro Aretino wrote to complement Giulio Romano's Italian answer to the Karma Sutra, Nyman has created eight musical dialogues that Marie Angel (playing man and woman) brings suggestively to life. A pungent curiosity.
  , The Independent, 29 November 2008
• ...The music's earthly sensuality is fun and Marie Angel's characterful singing a delight.
  , Classical Music, 16 August 2008
• The Lust Songs are Michael Nyman's most intensely lyrical and absorbing pieces, as far removed from English smut as Peter Greenaway's films from the Carry On series. They represent eroticism in the grand manner, setting Pietro Aretino's explicit 16th-century sonnets inspired by equally graphic engravings, which the booklet reproduces. marie Angel amused the London premiere audience by calling the texts 'much of a muchness', but her perceptive booklet essay confounds any such idea. Nyman draws out personality with a poet's imagination and a fitting variety of pace and rhythm. Vocal lines and string filigrees soar across the barlines while the band pulses away. time is made gradually to slow, eased by the spacious ecstacy of Angel's delivery and counterpointed by sharp characterisation -she takes male and female roles in a shared embrace that transcends gender.
  Robert Maycock, BBC Music magazine, 01 August 2008